Featured Scholar: February 2024

Dr. Jill Patterson (Professor, English)

What are you watching/streaming?

Usually I set my TV on the crime channel, with old episodes of Dateline or 20/20 running in the background. I don't know that I'm necessarily watching, but I'm listening to how their hosts are putting together a narrative—which is important to my work with public defenders. Potential jurors expect a “crime story” in a courtroom to sound and look like TV depictions. Otherwise, during the school year, I don't have time to watch anything. In the summer, when I leave Lubbock for a month to live in Chicago, I'm in a movie theater five times a week: every foreign film, documentary, indie movie. This summer, my top picks: Past Lives, Yin Ru Chen Yan, Earth Mama, and The League.

What games are you playing?

If I'm in an airport with an exceptionally long layover, I'll play Scavenger Hunt. I hate downloading games though—they're so addictive. I uninstall and then download them again when I'm traveling.

What are you listening to?

I have a tendency to focus on soundtracks. Right now: Oppenheimer, Barbie, and Are You There God, It's Me Margaret. Otherwise, I make and keep a mixed playlist every season, downloaded on a jump drive and with me in the car whenever I'm traveling by road. Summer 2023: Iggy Pop, “The Passenger,” The Backseat Lovers, “Pool House,” Everybody Loves an Outlaw, “I See Red,” Jackson Brown, “These Days,” etc. Just random songs I like at the moment.

What are you reading?

For a review assignment: Steeped in a Culture of Violence: Murder, Racial Injustice, and Other Violent Crimes in Texas, 1965-2020, edited by Brandon T. Jett and Kenneth W. Howell. For class, The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be a speculative memoir by Shannon Gibney. For fun, Taylor Byas's I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, a collection of poems that celebrate South Side Chicago, and Go As a River, by Shelley Read, a novel about the peach orchards of Colorado, the flooding Gunnison River, the fictional story based on the real-life destruction of small-town Iola back in the 1960s.

What are you writing/thinking about?

The book I've been working on for so many years now, If You Give a Man a Gun, focuses on white male gun violence in America. It entangles three stories: John Hinckley Jr. (a student at Texas Tech who attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan in the early '80s), a former colleague who terrorized our department and one of our alumni for a couple of years, and one of the capital murder cases for which I served as narrative consultant—The State of Texas v. Eric Lyle Williams. There are pop-up chapters on American gun culture: John Wick, Archie comics, Gene Autry, personal lubricant called Gun Oil, Popeye, Harold Edgerton, Lynyrd Skynyrd, etc.—as well as historic episodes mapping the evolution of the Second Amendment from its inception to today. Ultimately, it's the story of my encounters with gunmen, while living in NRA territory, teaching at a campus-carry university, and representing my home state's most notorious killers.